Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Unexploded Bombs Used In A Truck Bomb By Jabhat al-Nusra

Thanks to @troublejee for pointing out this post on Jihadist forum showing a rather interesting detail from a recent truck bomb attack executed by Jabhat al-Nusra. The post details an attack that took place using what they claim was a 3.5 tonne truck bomb, claiming to have killed 200 men and injuring many more. It's impossible to verify these claims, but I believe it relates to this report from Hama where 50 government soldiers were reportedly killed.

What caught my eye was this following image

This shows the payload of the bomb, fairly typical lengths of metal tubes filled with explosives, as seen in other examples of truck bombs, but what I find very interesting is what's between some of them.
The 4th and 6th items from the left aren't barrels of explosives, but appear to be unexploded FAB 500 M62 high explosive bombs, a pair of which can be seen in this video

As Bjørn H Jespersen notes on his blog post examining UXO evidence of FAB 500 M62s these are one of the most powerful bombs used in the conflict, carrying 200kg of high explosives, so those two bombs on the truck contain at least 400kg of high explosives, so it's no wonder that along with the explosives in the barrels they produce an massive explosion like this

Update January 7th The following video shows footage from the above attack, including the martyr video of the driver, and footage of the vehicle driving into the compound shortly before detonating. The video also allows us to confirm the location